ortals generally, at a definite instant
of time, but that very little subsequent notice is ever taken of the
fact. On the contrary, from the moment he makes his appearance he is
spoken of as a year old, and this same age he continues to be considered
in most simple ease of calculation, till the beginning of the next
calendar year. When that epoch of general rejoicing arrives, he is
credited with another year himself. So is everybody else. New Year's day
is a common birthday for the community, a sort of impersonal anniversary
for his whole world. A like reckoning is followed in China and Korea.
Upon the disadvantages of being considered from one's birth up at least
one year and possibly two older than one really is, it lies beyond our
present purpose to expatiate. It is quite evident that woman has had no
voice in the framing of such a chronology. One would hardly imagine
that man had either, so astronomic is the system. A communistic age
is however but an unavoidable detail of the general scheme whose most
suggestive feature consists in the subordination of the actual birthday
of the individual to the fictitious birthday of the community. For it is
not so much the want of commemoration shown the subject as the character
of the commemoration which is significant. Some slight notice is indeed
paid to birthdays during early childhood, but even then their observance
is quite secondary in importance to that of the great impersonal
anniversaries of the third day of the third moon and the fifth day of
the fifth moon. These two occasions celebrated the coming of humanity
into the world with an impersonality worthy of the French revolutionary
calendar. The first of them is called the festival of girls, and
commemorates the birth of girls generally, the advent of the universal
feminine, as one may say. The second is a corresponding anniversary for
boys. Owing to its sex, the latter is the greater event of the two, and
in consequence of its most conspicuous feature is styled the festival of
fishes. The fishes are hollow paper images of the "tai" from four to six
feet in length, tied to the top of a long pole planted in the ground and
tipped with a gilded ball. Holes in the paper at the mouth and the
tail enable the wind to inflate the body so that it floats about
horizontally, swaying hither and thither, and tugging at the line after
the manner of a living thing. The fish are emblems of good luck, and are
set up in the courtyard of